A Relaxed Screening of this programme will take place simultaneously at Berwick Town Hall Council Chamber.
Naeem Mohaiemen and Molla Sagar are BFMAF26 Filmmakers in Focus, with post-screening conversations faciltated by Dr Sanghita Sen, Assistant Professor in Film, Department of Arts, Northumbria University, Newcastle.
Sanghita Sen is a film and cultural studies scholar and a documentary filmmaker with a background in English & comparative literature, and Linguistics. She completed her second PhD in Film Studies—centred on the Bengali cinema of the 1970s—at the University of St. Andrews before joining the University of Northumbria in 2023. Field work undertooken for the thesis paved the way for a feature length documentary on Ritwik Ghatak, the Bengal Partition, and refugee crisis. Whilst subsequent research interests have widened to include tricontinental political cinema and its facilitation of cultural encounters between filmmakers from the Global South.
The programme is supported by Midnight’s Third Child through the British Council’s Connections Through Culture Programme.
Siren
Once hailed as “golden fibre,” jute bound field to factory, sustaining millions across Bengal. This film bears witness to its slow unravelling – from colonial boom to post-independence nationalisation, and the brutal retrenchments of the 1980s that shuttered mills and cast workers adrift. In the shadow of the closures at Khalishpur in Khulna, Siren listens to the aftershocks: hunger, dispossession, and the quiet terror of futures collapsing into silence.
Abu Ammar is Coming
A photograph taken by a Magnum photographer in 1982 lingers like a provocation: five men in fatigues inside a bombed-out room – four gaze outward, one meets the camera. The elusive image was said to show Bangladeshi fighters aligned with the PLO’s Fatah faction. Abu Ammar Is Coming revisits the revolutionary 1970s through the figure of Abu Ammar (the nom de guerre of Yasser Arafat), tracing how internationalist dreams flickered against the gathering dark.
Ganga Buri
A lyrical poem about the forever flow of the Ganges river, Ganga Buri can be seen as a love letter to its position in people’s hearts. Focusing on the ancient ritual of ‘Ganga Puja’, where people come to be spiritually cleansed by the water, Sagar imagines the hopes of this mother river – that she would want to purify her children as they speak to her.
Rankin Street, 1953
In a small box salvaged from his old family home in Dhaka, Mohaiemen discovered over a hundred negatives, wrapped in wax paper and carefully labeled in his father’s handwriting. The intimate archive showed no rallies, no flags, only the quiet theatre of domestic life in newly formed East Pakistan – and lots of cats. In Rankin Street, 1953 / 2013, he scans, redraws, and narrates these fragments, asking how private tenderness shadows the larger, vanishing histories of a nation.
Doodh Koila
In Bucchigram, under Phulbari in Dinajpur, Santal farmers speak of the land as blood-bound – they will not leave it. Shot during the 2006–07 Phulbari coal movement, the film documents their resistance to open-cast mining and the threat to their agrarian way of life. Children sing “Amar Sonar Bangla” (My Golden Bengal, I love you) in school, even as the soil beneath them is marked for extraction. In Bangladesh, belonging becomes both anthem and barricade.
Wooster Street
Wooster Street unfolds as an afternoon conversation between Naeem Mohaiemen and Judith Blum inside the storied Fluxus Building – a fading remnant of SoHo’s artist-run utopia shaped by George Maciunas. Weaving Blum’s voice with home movies and echoes of Jonas Mekas, the film becomes a lockdown elegy for a vanished community, where art once remade life – and now survives as memory.